Vienna Journal; A Cemetery Mirroring the History of a City's Jews

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: May 13, 2003

VIENNA—
There are a couple of swastikas spray-painted on the wall that faces the wall behind which the cemetery lies, and they seem to add insult to the plain neglect of the place.

This is one of the old Jewish cemeteries of Vienna, containing the graves of some 8,000 to 10,000 Jews who died in this city between the late 18th and the late 19th centuries. Giant, aristocratic linden trees line the central alley, which leads down a gentle slope bordered by the tombstones of the bankers, industrialists, railroad magnates and many common people who made up an essential part of Viennese life.

But the cemetery, in the Wahring section of Vienna, while often spoken of as a ''cultural treasure'' by those who know about it, remains largely unattended and unmaintained. Hundreds of its thousands of gravestones were knocked over by the Nazis in World War II, and they still lie on their sides, entangled in weeds and vines.

Some grave sites, like the imposing tomb of the family of Bernhard Pollack, who was a well-known 19th-century art collector in Vienna, have been dug out by tomb robbers, who thought they would be filled with gold and jewels. The pits are filled with dead branches, beer cans, broken glass and loose bricks stamped with eagles, the symbol of the former Viennese brickworks.

''It's a jewel, and it's a wonderful piece of history, one of the most important Jewish cemeteries in Europe,'' said Kurt Scholz, the city government official in charge of restitution for Jewish properties stolen or destroyed in World War II. ''You have all of the famous names of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.''

The cemetery has been restored twice since 1945, Mr. Scholz said, and in the 1970's and 80's it was open to the public. But since then it has fallen into disrepair, the very trees that lend so much to its stately beauty now a danger because of dead and falling branches.

''Now,'' Mr. Scholz allowed, ''it's a shame.''

The truth is that Wahring Cemetery, in a city that has three other Jewish cemeteries, one of them even older, has not been an issue at the forefront of Austrian or even of the Jewish-Austrian consciousness. Many people, including some Jews, do not even know that it exists.

But it is an extraordinary sight, even in its state of unbenign neglect. It has that chiaroscuro solemnity, that weighty stillness of all old, tree-shaded cemeteries, and its tragic history, a mirror of the tragic history of Vienna's Jews, lends it an added valedictory quality. It is a ruin from a community that is itself a kind of ruin, a struggling fragment of what was once a vital part of one of the great cities of Europe.

''I would blame the government,'' Tina Walzer, a historian who has spent the last two years cataloging the Jewish cemeteries of Austria, said of the cemetery's sorry condition. ''Compare this with Germany, where the government and the communities take care of the cemeteries. They've been doing that since 1953, and there's no reason why they don't do that here, too.''

In fact, two years ago, cemeteries were mentioned in a restitution agreement, brokered by the United States, in which the Austrian government agreed to create a $210 million fund to compensate victims of stolen properties who have not been compensated in previous restitutions. Austria was to ''make additional efforts to restore and maintain Jewish cemeteries known or unknown'' throughout the country, according to the agreement.

Jewish community leaders say Austria has done essentially nothing to restore the Wahring Cemetery. But Viennese officials like Mr. Scholz maintain that work has begun on what will be, by 2005, a full restoration, and the creation of what he calls ''a landmark of Jewish and Viennese history,'' complete with a computerized information center showing the lives of the people buried here.

''All we've gotten from the city so far is money to measure the area, and to cut the trees that would endanger the graves and visitors,'' said Avshalom Hodik, the general secretary of the Jewish community.

Mr. Scholz agrees that the national government, which signed the restitution agreement, has provided nothing. But the city of Vienna is in the process of deciding which trees should be cut down and which can remain, he said. Once that has been done, it will move on to the gravestones themselves.

There are those in Austria who argue that the Jewish community should be responsible for its own properties. But as Mr. Scholz and many others contend, this point of view fails to take into account the signal fact of recent Jewish history: that a rich and powerful community that numbered about 200,000 in 1938 was reduced essentially to nothing by 1945.

''Unlike, say, the Lutherans,'' Mr. Scholz said, ''you don't have Jewish families who can take care of the graves, because the Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.''

He continued: ''This cemetery is a little like Snow White. It has been kept in a deep sleep by all sides, and now it is time to kiss it awake.''

Meanwhile, to visit the cemetery, you need somebody like Ms. Walzer, who has a key to the heavy door at the entrance and can let you in. One recent afternoon, she pointed out the tomb of the Fuerth family, which came from Bohemia in the 19th century and built the house that is now the American Consulate in Vienna.

Nearby, in the same row near the east wall of the cemetery is the tomb of the Epstein family, which was ennobled by the emperor and was therefore proud to display a coat of arms on its tomb, unsuspecting that the tomb would be wrecked in the very city whose glories it helped to build.

Photo: Tina Walzer, a historian, at the ruin of the Wahring Cemetery in Vienna. ''I would blame the government,'' she said. ''Compare this with Germany.'' (Roland Schlager for The New York Times)